Amazon restricted my account and will not refund gift card balance of £200. Totally blindsided. Any advice??

Amazon pays well, better than most companies, customer service for example starts at about 15ph starting with health care pensions etc as well. But drivers are usually gig workers not employed directly with amazon but through a company who poorly pays. You can also sign up as a flex driver and pick up shifts you want but if a customer makes a complaint about a driver delivering improperly or late the driver gets three strikes and is then off roaded which means turn over can be high. There are often reports of drivers peeing in bottles etc and this is true and is true for lots of delivery drivers and truck drivers etc. They have targets to achieve, no access to toilets.

What could help is a few things:

An ease up on targets. Stop promising customers delivery within a certain time frame.
Access to toilets, agreements for longer breaks to get to bathrooms.
End to gig culture. By forcing companies like amazon deliveroo etc to stop hiring people in this way and employing them directly it allows drivers access to rights and benefits not afforded to them.

Often it costs more to send it back so they will cut their losses and tell you to keep or donate.

Same is true for perishable goods returns.

Its a percentage of order volume and order value versus the volume of refund requests.

So say 3 x 10£ orders placed in entire amazon history. 4th 10£ doesnt arrive. Refund requested , no issue.

4th order is an apple iPhone pro , triggers concession abuse.

Or

100 orders placed every month, 33% returned will trigger as you shouldn't have that many return needs and could suggest you are a seller bypassing setting up a seller account. This likelihood increases if you have more than 15 addresses on your account as it suggests you are selling through amazon and pretending they are orders.

Again , high gc balance and constant delivered not received will flag.

Algorithms are not infallible and its likely if OP reaches out properly that this will be over turned.

I get that but ultimately they have decided they don't want your custom which they are entitled to do.

It's not your fault I know but I doubt there's anything you can do.

OT but (as I’m sure you realise) they would just chuck it if sent back to them which is why they didn’t want it back.

I’ve had that a few times over the years with smaller items, eg a book my children already had (my fault), a game of Top Trumps where they inexplicably sent me the German version. Both times they said no need to send them back.

Dh had a similar thing happen and escalated it to Customer Support, Head Office in London - wrote an actual letter, detailing exactly how the problem had arisen, with reference numbers etc. It was resolved fairly quickly, and satisfactorily in the end. The address is Amazon Corporate Office, LHR16, 1 Principal Place, London, EC2A 2FA.

This advice on Google -
Executive and Direct Emails

• Managing Director: Email [email protected]. This goes to a high-level support team, but they normally expect you to have an existing customer service case ID first.
• Executive Relations: Some UK consumers have success emailing executive customer support at [email protected] or [email protected].

A poster asked what digital purchase are.

Digital purchases are the likes of e-books and streamed films or music products from Netflix etc. Obviously they cant go "missing" because they are not delivered in physical form.

I only had one missing item from Amazon in 15 years. It was a £5 wire stripper.I asked for a replacement. The original turned up a week later. They told me to keep it. Who needs 2 wire strippers?

If your parcels keep getting stolen why keep ordering anyway?

Basically you are costing them money and they are entitled to chose who they want as their customers.

As for the gift card, if you purchased it with your own money I would push for them to refund it via their complaint process.

Otherwise, spend it on Kindle Books, films etc over the next year or so.

I assume it's the case that (due to poor pay and conditions) Amazon have trouble recruiting good delivery personnel. That's why so many of their staff just dump packages at various locations which are no where near the front door of the intended recipient?

Yes I've started using Amazon by preference because I find their deliveries are reliable. Many other online retailers use Evri and I never seem to actually receive anything from them. They always say they haven't been able to deliver after 2 attempts and return it, even when we were all in.

I'll use other companies if I know they're going to use Royal Mail, but often they don't specify and it will turn out to be Evri.

That's interesting, thank you? Is there a set value or number of returns or is it proportional to the account turnover?

DP does some work that is paid in Amazon vouchers and there is always a substantial balance on the account. As a result we buy a lot through Amazon, and do sometimes do returns. Only once had somehting not turn up and that actually came through Royal Mail, the empty box arrived in a bag appologising for the "damage".

Anyway, there are a number of returns on the account but only a small percentage of the transactions. Does that put his account at risk. I'm worried about accumulating a big balance and losing it now!

Easier said than done. I live in a remote area with limited options. Some companies won't deliver here and if they do it often takes longer for things to arrive, typically a week longer. This is because the courier companies subcontract it to small local delivery services. Amazon send most of their stuff via Royal Mail which is very reliable here. We can't get next day delivery but most things will be delivered in less than a week.

I'd happily use another company if I could rely on them sending stuff via Royal Mail but it's not always easy to tell which delivery service will be used. Sometimes Amazon is the only practical option. To give an example, a while ago I needed to get my hands on a mobile phone quickly but I couldn't get one anywhere locally. The nearest place to buy one was a 7 hour round trip away.

OP won't get a better or more helpful response than this.

You won’t get the gift card money sent to you because of money laundering. Just use it up on digital purchases.

I would try to speak to a human on the chat function, you have to go through loads of faffing to get to that point as they try to make bots deal with everything.
Ive found that when I’ve had issues the humans are always more than happy to help and usually offer up a refund or further support when it’s very much ‘computer says no’ with the bot.

🤣 I have do date a few that never arrived. No issues with refunds. I had one that was delivered - but to the wrong address. The driver took a picture of the parcel at my front door. Exept it wasn't. Had to go to some lengths to prove otherwise.

I send quite a few items back... maybe every 4-6 weeks, the majority is shoes/ clothes. (Sometimes they just refund & don't bother with a return, which is annoying.)
I think it's about the value of the items that go missing. They also know the lengths some customers go to in order to get a refund...

I suspect if you go through the appeals process you’ll get your account back eventually but surely you must see businesses don’t get as big as Amazon have by allowing “bad” customers to continue with such a high rate of missing or returned custom? It just makes no business sense.

If you get back in, always choose the locker option and only order if you’re pretty sure of fit, quality etc.

If someone has so many problems with Amazon deliveries, why keep ordering to the same address? We get several a week, even several within a day. Mostly ordered by my DH for his company and we rarely have any go missing. Occasionally some have been left behind a wall in our front garden which isn't ideal but if the service was unreliable/ generally no one was home to answer the front door, we wouldn't keep doing the same thing over and over again. It sounds like OP has pushed their luck too far.

I think if I’d have received an email
warning about account conduct I would not be making anymore missing parcel refund requests unless I wanted to lose my account. I would have just lost the £9.99 and reordered.

And what exactly do you hope to achieve by firing off a quick judgey comment to a single individual on mumsnet?

When huge companies like Amazon are offering this service, which is cheap and easy, then of course people will use it.

Many people struggle with organisation and will not plan ahead in order to have one delivery per week when quick, convenient, cheap options are offered. That is simply how people are, and you're not exactly going to change that with knee jerk accusatory and unpleasant comments on here.

Amazon dominate the market and make it too easy, using exploitation and dodgy ethical practices to make things extremely cheap and fast.

Maybe take up the issue with Amazon or your MP, rather than venting at individual consumers.

what are you buying? Maybe they have done you a favour. You sound like you have a shopping addiction

Write to the consumer journalist at The Guardian because once firms are mentioned they usually compensate by way of a financial incentive as they don't like being shown in a bad way or contact Rip Off Britain with you looking sad that they won't let you spend a voucher that was a present.

Amazing are usually so good with customer service too